I was happy with the ASUS 1215N netbook for a while, other than having to tear the thing apart just to swap out the hard drive (totally ridiculous) it was actually a really decent little portable. It was small, light and got the job done for hitting the web, emails and what not. Well after about 6 months of rather light use it froze up right at the BIOS coming up, couldn't reset, get into setup, nothing. Then because I changed hard drives it voided the warranty, what a complete piece of shit. The thing ran just under $500, eePC's SUCK!
Anyway after checking out a lot of other options I pulled the trigger on an Alienware M11x, thing ROCKS. It's about the same size as the Netbook other than a bit thicker. It's a real Laptop not one of the ATOM CPU's, they start out about $100 more than the eePC netbooks with 2Gig RAM, Core 2 Duo. I upped mine to 8Gig RAM with an i5 CPU. This is since I run VMWare so it works outstanding. Anyway only downside is that it uses Nvidia Optimus graphics which is totally incompatible with Linux. So I had to suck it up and go with Win 7, I'm running Win 7 Enterprise but have VMWare Workstation so I have a Linux image ready to fire up when needed. This little Lappy kicks some serious butt, an excellent portable solution, I'm happy as a clam!
